Monday, May 3, 2010

The IT printed a deeply unbalanced opinion piece by John Gibbons the other day. John had a fairly serious go at Bjorn Lomborg, who has had the temerity to question the status quo on human induced climate change. While one expects opinion pieces to be opinionated one doesn't expect a national 'newspaper of record' to allow a writer to falsly accuse a public figure of lying about his academic qualifications. Gibbons gave the piece the title "Exposed: Climate change doubter with a PhD only in spin". John describes Mr Mr. Lomburg as "someone without even an undergraduate degree in a physical science", when in fact he has a Phd in Political Science.

John's argument is that people without 'relevant' qualifications don't have the right to criticise people who do. I sent the letter below to the IT, which didn't get published:

Madam,

The title of John Gibbons opinion piece 'Climate change doubter with PhD only in spin' (April 30) directly challenges the validity of Bjorn Lomburg's academic qualifications, yet nowhere in his article does he substantiate the serious allegation made in the article's title that Mr Lomburg is lying about his 1994 Phd in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen.

The fact that Mr. Lomburg does not hold a Gibbons-Approved qualification in climate science is not relevant and does not deny him or anyone else the right to question the reasons for climate change. I would be very surprised if the staff of your newspaper included anyone with postgraduate qualifications in Creationism, Canon Law or Eugenics, but thankfully that does not prevent your writers from casting a critical eye over such disciplines.

Carl Sagan once said that 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. The exteme sensitivity to criticism that climate scientists display, along with their documented use of dubious sources of information means that their evidence is indeed extraordinary, but for all the wrong reasons.

David Rolfe

The interesting thing is that no letters on this Opinion piece have shown up, which considering how provocative and inaccurate it is makes one wonder what goes on in the mind of the editor. It;'s a bit like the truly crazy report on the "Spirit of Ireland" scheme, which never got discussed on the letters page either despite being an announcement that coastal valleys all around Ireland were to be dammed and filled with Sea Water by vast shoals of windwills.

4 comments:

"Gibbons gave the piece the title "Exposed: Climate change doubter with a PhD only in spin""

Generally, sub-editors give pieces their titles, although we cannot be sure thats what happened in this case it seems likely, as it is standard practice for all newspapers?

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"John describes Mr Mr. Lomburg as "someone without even an undergraduate degree in a physical science", when in fact he has a Phd in Political Science"

Political Science is not a Physical Science?? ___________________________

And on Lomberg, even Richard Tol (who has worked with Lomberg via the 'Copenhagen Consensus') admits that Lomberg's first book (which John Gibbons is discussing) is not accurate - to quote Tol "Bjorn Lomborg is a not a scholar. Scholars publish their research in peer-reviewed journals. Lomborg has one such paper.

Lomborg writes books with popular science. In popular science, there is a trade-off between accuracy and sales. Lomborg sells well"

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The issue with Lomberg is not his right to question climate science - anyone has that right - but his understanding of it, and selective use of quotes and extensive (inaccurate) footnoting that makes it seem scientific/authoritative to the average reader, when in fact it is heavily slanted to a particular point of view. he can question what he likes but if he is wrong in his conclusions and assertions he should be called up on it, which is what happened here...

The article makes a clear inference that Lomburn has no real qualifications. The phrase 'without even a' is telling.

Lomborg writes books with popular science. In popular science, there is a trade-off between accuracy and sales. Lomborg sells well"

That's a snide and bitchy way of saying he's full of crap. I would question the idea of a trade-off. Is Stephen Hawking full of crap? And no, I'm not comparing Lomburg to Hawking....Except that Hawking is in a wheelchair and a lot of evironmentalists would like to put Lomburg in one if their reaction to him is anything to go by... :)

selective use of quotes and extensive (inaccurate) footnoting that makes it seem scientific/authoritative to the average reader, when in fact it is heavily slanted to a particular point of view.

Lomburg may well be guilty of this, but so are a lot of other people on the other side if the argument. Apparently authorative scientific reports turn out to be full of references to press releases and articles in climbing magazines. The same people who claim that tempertures are remorselessly climbing refuse to release their source data to anyone.

I'd have to (respectfully) disagree with you about the inference, but it is open to interpretation as written.

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As Tol has worked with Lomberg, that fact that he is saying in a 'snide and bitchy way' (to quote yourself) that Lomberg is 'full of crap' is somewhat telling.

However I would agree with you in that science writing can (and should) be both accurate and accessible, the trade off that Tol refers to is not one worth making. However, controversy definitely sells books, gets one press coverage etc. and to some people that is very important - regrettably so._______________________________

If its AR4 you're referring to (possibly not, as there is a lot of literature on this so I can't be sure, and apologies in advance if this is not the report you are talking about) - the mistakes are limited, and the ones referencing press releases/mountain magazines all were in WG2 and WG3. WG1 is very solid, as it is 'The Physical Science' part of the Assessment Report (for example, the famous glacier/Himalayas/2035 mistake in WG2 which referenced a magazine was actually covered correctly, with the correct dates etc. in WG1)

Given that AR4 is 3000 pages and the major mistakes are limited to 1)quote re Dutch flooding, mistake by Dutch Environmental Agency, being corrected.2)Glaciers, 2035, being corrected3) African food production, being debated/corrected, and fact that it is uncertain clearly stated4) 'Amazongate'and a few others, see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/to say it is 'full' of mistakes is not accurate.

Corrections and updates are being published where pointed out.

The references are also clear. Any mistakes spotted are acknowledged and corrected/updated, as it is proper.

I haven't seen Lomberg acknowledging his mistakes/misquotes anywhere.

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Agree with you 100% that all data should be freely available to anyone who wants to examine it. A great deal of the relevant data is, and even more is being added now (e.g met office in UK etc) after 'climategate' (every 'cloud' has a silver lining!) but any exceptions are not acceptable, data should be freely accessible. But the great majority is available, and it all points one direction... Man made climate change is a reality, but there is a great deal of uncertainty about the impacts/feedbacks etc. But just because we don't know exactly how bad it is that is not a reason for inaction, in fact the uncertainty about whether it will be 1 0r 6 degrees of warming means we should be cautious and act now, if we wait until we are certain about exact impacts/temp change it may be too late.

Paddy - I appreciate your interest but I have finite time - so I'll have to be selective in my comments:

data should be freely accessible.

And this is the heart of the matter - it should be, but isn't.

People who have tried to get their hands on the original, unmodified source data of temperatures have been ignored, then stonewalled and finally told the data is either covered by an IP agreement or 'lost'. I've seen the email exchanges.

The key thing is that the raw data needs to be processed so it's in a consistent form and amenable to automated processing. There are entirely legitimate concerns that this processing is creating effects as big as the observed changes that are described as 'global warming'. For example: Even if I have an ideal weather station where every day for the past 200 years the temperature has been measured using the same equipment at the same time of day the raw data will still be unusable if the weather station started out in a rural region and is now in a large city due to urbanization. I therefore need to adjust my temperature readings. But by how much? And how fast?

But the great majority is available, and it all points one direction.

The raw data isn't available. And you could argue the results all point in one direction because we've only been measuring temperatures accurately for a couple of human lifetimes. Attempts to measure temperatures before that rely on surrogates such as tree growth, which are indicative but not accurate.

To be honest I haven't got time to get into every last dot and t on this. I would say a couple of things:

1. John Gibbons has a bizarre notion that only people with 'appropriate' qualifications can comment on global warming. Apparently 'Political Science' isn't relevant to persuading the Indians and Chinese to make huge sacrifices to compensate for the alleged behavior of the west!

2. Climate Science is politicized. Pretty much everybody involved is pushing an agenda of some kind, and the IPCC are no different. There's a lot of money to be made in global warming. If you thought the Oil Business was morally corrupting wait until you see the Carbon Credit business. At least Oil is a tangible commodity.

3. I work in the computer business. I deal with terabytes of data every day. People underestimate the quality problems associated with 150 years of data collected by 100 or so different organizations using different equipment. People also put far too much faith in computer models, especially ones that 'breed' the same data over hundreds of thousands of cycles. We can't accurately predict the behavior of this week's volcanic ash or next week's weather, yet we're being asked to make drastic changes to our societies based on a computer model of the climate 50 years from now.

4. If I wanted to really stir things up I'd compare climate science with Eugenics. Both start with a foundation of physical measurements and then make plausible but unverifiable conclusions with dramatic implications for how to run the planet. In its heyday Eugenics was just as popular as Climate Science & Global Warming and had just as much allegedly hard science behind it.